A True Game Changer

by Crazy Ivan


In November of 2011, Myachi made took an enormous leap forward with the introduction of the new Battle Paddles.  The first rudimentary prototypes were first fashioned in Cocoa Beach back in 2003 and for all the intervening years, we eagerly awaited the right time to introduce them to the Myachi playing universe.

They look like that, but bigger and three dimensional.

The concept is pretty simple.  They're like a baseball mitt for Myachi.  They strap on to the back of your hand and expand the total catching surface making it easier to catch big air throws, long distance chucks and crazy difficult aerial tricks.  They open up freestyle moves to a much younger audience and they open up athletic moves to even the most seasoned Myachi veteran.  They expand the game beyond freestyle, MYACH and Fu players and create whole new worlds of Myachi-sport.

They are game-changers in both the literal and figurative sense.  They've changed the game of Myachi, but they've also been a game changer for the company.  We've been selling them as fast as we can make them and we've already smashed even our most optimistic sales goals with them.  Stores all over the country are selling out of them and we've seen reorders galore even over the first few months of the year.

Some people have complained about the level to which the paddles have changed the game and I suppose that in a sense I see where they're coming from.  Some dedicated freestylers complain that paddles make the tricks "too" easy and that they shift the focus of the game from the tricks to the passes.  But can only sympathize with this argument to a small degree.  Sure, they change the focus for some people and sure, they make the tricks more accessible.  But is that a bad thing?

Obviously, adding the paddle doesn't take any of the skill out of paddle-free tricks.  I'm far more impressed by a Kelly Slater dropped to a bare hand than one with a Paddle on it.  That being said, I really wish I'd had a paddle at my disposal when I was learning that trick.  It would have saved me a lot of frustration and I probably would have mastered even the bare-handed version of it far quicker.  So while the paddles change the game, they only change it for people wearing the paddle.

And accessibility has always been the hallmark of Myachi.  The whole point that inspired Myachi Man in the first place was making a skill toy that everyone could play.  Now, the Myachi did fall a bit short of that goal.  While it is certainly the easiest skill toy to learn and the easiest to build an impressive repertoire of tricks with, it still wasn't accessible to everyone.  Kids under 6 couldn't really play at all and some people who were behind the curve in coordination could only do a very limited number of tricks.  Catching back and forth throws actually required some serious practice, especially if those throws included any real speed or height.

But now those boundaries have been widened.  There are still limits, of course, but they are smaller and smaller margins.  I've seen 5 year olds throwing down with paddles and I've seen grandmas master the catch in an instant.  I've seen people who weren't all that interested in learning tricks get fired up about long distance catch.  I've seen skilled people throwing down tricks on their first day that were once limited to people with weeks of practice.

So yeah, they change the game, but only in the best of ways.  There are still plenty of hold-outs in the Myachi community when it comes to the paddles, but I've already had the pleasure of changing a few minds.  When it comes down to it, all that it took to inspire such an epiphany was strapping a paddle on the back of a doubting hand.